What do players want?

[Mu_ad_Diib]

@Epiphany_Blacque

I’ll be the Wildcard

Sounds fine to me.

Joking apart, I genuinely don’t think it should be that difficult to organise the CSM so that it’s both more representative and better from a democratic point of view.

There are several very straightforward ways that CCP could do this. What I’ve written below is based on the assumption that the CSM would want to retain a maximum of ten representative players at any given time.

1 . Home Stations
You could divide up the player base, using the location of their home station of choice as a metric starting point and then subdividing them into 10 constituencies with roughly the same numbers of players in them.

This would ensure that ensure that each representative came from and represented a fairly divided chunk of the player base.

2 . Geographic Division
You could subdivide the map into constituency areas. I had a go at this.

I freely accept (especially as far as null sec goes) that what I’ve done might very well be clumsy and flawed, but I did it really to illustrate a principle rather than to produce a final version of what the map might actually look like.

Essentially using this breakdown there’d be four representatives coming from high sec, one from each empire, plus four representatives coming from and serving low security space, plus two wild card reps, who might stand on the basis of representing wormholes, Trigs, etc. (aside of this there were also a couple of areas of space where there didn’t seem to be an obvious ‘fit’).

3. Career and Endeavour
You could subdivide the player base up by their activity in the preceding year.

Given that CCP is totally focussed when it comes to the demographics of the player base (which is awesome because the sheer scale of data that they present for things like ‘My Year in EVE’ is fairly mind blowing ) you could split players into constituencies based on this metric.

For example, you might have four seats for null sec (because it’s a special case) plus a seat each for miners, industrialists, haulers, merchants, explorers and PvP.

This is all coming off the top of my head, so I’m definitely not suggesting that any of these ideas are worked out to the extent where they could or should be deployed tomorrow.

I do think there should be some reflection and serious thought applied to how the CSM functions and how representative it really is of the overall player base in EVE and hopefully this post will help to facilitate this.

In terms of what I wrote, I was very conscious of the need to balance representation so that there is a voice for both null/low sec and high sec because I genuinely believe that both deserve representation on the CSM. It’s not a case or either/or it’s a case of both.

At the moment the CSM is just not that representative, and as said above, some voices ring out loudly and repeatedly and others are completely silent time after time after time, which is not really that democratic.

[ArgelOTF2]

@Miranda_Farron

@ArgelOTF2

Even if someone focuses entirely on PVP, the chances of them learning, experiencing and winning in solo PVP are slim in the first 6 months.

How do we know this? This is a subjective assessment of the capabilities of the average new player right? I’m not sure this holds true of an intelligent person truly focused entirely on PvP.

What are the variables? Who are they fighting against? How dumb is their opponent?

I killed a guy in a Tech II Destroyer in my Tech I Frigate in my first 6 months, think he was a 5 year vet (would have to check my kill records). Was he a complete idiot? Am I above average? Who knows.

Not sure, can’t see the KM you refer to.

If you don’t believe that PVP is nigh on impossible in the early phase, then let me put it this way. I started a corp with a bunch of newbros, we all use the same (unrelated to EVE) forum and about 15-20 of us signed up full of the idea that this was a spaceship simulator where a corp of us could carve out a fun living and maybe colonise a small area of space. Of that group, about 8 or 9 saw out the initial 1 week introductory phase as people realised how overwhelming it is.

All but me quit over the following 4 months, upon which I managed my first solo kill that was a reasonably fair fight. I was the only one to subscribe longer than a month. Even then, in FW, I struggled to get anything approaching an even contest. That seems flawed to me, because everywhere else in EVE has legions of people looking to trick others into overmatched combat scenarios, but FW shouldn’t.

I think there should be ‘new player friendly’ areas of FW that allow < 2 month chars to fight each other for a reward.

@Miranda_Farron

Assuming that what you or I did doesn’t require some kind of supernatural ability to do things that normal humans can’t do, then no, there is nothing naive about thinking this. If I can, they can. Of course, doesn’t mean they should or that they will, but it absolutely means they could.

This was a direct reference to a guy saying that his 2 month success story was mainly facilitated by having more time than the average person, so yeah, his ability to spend the level of time needed is unusual, as is mine, come to think about it.

[Gerard_Amatin]

@Fale_Einn

Second the UI has far to many things that could be done with one window and a single click but instead have a bunch of windows and require a lot of unintuitive clicking.

I really agree with this.

I still remember the day CCP decided to nest my main method of travel, bookmarks, one menu deeper for no reason at all.

Instead of making life easier, warping around to bookmarks became just a little more tedious than before. And when people complain, they add a new redundant window which shows all hundreds of bookmarks in system in alphabetical order in a gigantic list, as if that solves the issue.

Instead it takes even longer to find the correct bookmark in that gigantic list than it does to find my ‘quick warp out to safety now or die!!’-bookmark nested in 4 sub windows. Also, I already have the people and places window to show a list of all my bookmarks, but that list has this useful option to show only certain bookmarks instead of all of them.

CCP’s UI choices are sometimes good, but sometimes I really really don’t understand them.

[Nana_Skalski]

@Gerard_Amatin

sometimes I really really don’t understand them

They would better listen to us (me especially) or else they will have to pick up the sheep herding again, or fermenting the shark in urine.

[Gerard_Amatin]

Nooo, if they start listening to you they might change that beautiful design of the Imicus.

(Although I agree it could use a retexture.)

[Nana_Skalski]

@Gerard_Amatin

beautiful desing of the Imicus

I understand some people like it for how strong feelings of pity or compassion it causes, but Imicus can be a strong, symmetrical frigate, with nothing to fear. Completely chad like, and every gallente girl wanting to take a ride in it.

[Gerard_Amatin]

Eww, symmetrical.

[Zoiie]

Free stuffz, like World of Spaceships…

Oh… they already caved into our demands already… ok… ummmm Linux client.

[Fale_Einn]

Bookmarks are a perfect example. I have something like sixty folders now, I’m not sure if the actually number, but for as many regions or groups of regions we (meaning my corp and our friends) we have folders, also wormholes, tactical ones for specific gates, routes we commonly use, and so on. Finding them is a nightmare, squinting at a tiny menu that you have to tunnel three or four deep into submenus is a worse nightmare, and switching between online, connected and disconnected is maddening.
We still can’t do something as simple as drag and drop a bookmark into chat windows which, it seems to me would make a lot of sense.
There are a lot of things like this, in planetary stuff you sometimes have to move things from one place to another, depending on what the place is you have to do it differently, you have to select what you want to move, tell the UI you want to move that thing, and then it deselects what you just selected and tells you you need to select something. If you screw up which is entirely too easy to do you have wait for an amazingly long time to try again. In some instances you move things from one place to the other, and these are poorly labeled, in another case you have to move things into a slot in the middle which is fairly counterintuitive as well, meanwhile you are being hunted if you are doing this stuff anywhere interesting.
On top of all that the basic structures you use have to be packed in so close to each other that they sometimes overlap, they are unlabeled, and all in all its frustrating and tedious when it doesn’t have to be. When you are done doing anything you have to hit a submit button, then if you haven’t it asked you if you want to abandon your edits, you have two options, yes and cancel, what it needs is yes and no, save changes like all UI’s have had since… the begining of home computing I guess.
There’s so many things like this making a full list would result in a wall of text that would be enough to enrage the pope.
All of it is fixable but instead of making something easier they seem to be adding more windows, menus and buttons when they should be reducing them.

[Epiphany_Blacque]

Thank you for your feedback
Some great ideas

[Epiphany_Blacque]

Thank you for your feedback

Some great ideas here

[hellokittyonline]

@Cypherous

Was removed to prevent people never having to touch belts in order to gain massive amounts of minerals, i know i used to build lots of ships in null back when you could just farm for loot, never had to mine

That makes no sense and now you’re just making ■■■■ up to see yourself type. Furthermore, how the minerals are obtained doesn’t matter. What matters is that lazy PvEers should not be receiving direct ISK deposits from an NPC. It’s why plex is so expensive, it’s why our currency is so inflated, and it hurts new-bros heavily.

@Cypherous

Which nerf in particular are you referring too?

An old one that you probably weren’t here for.

@Cypherous

Except it doesn’t work that way, we both know it, and players having loads of ISK doesn’t suddenly make it so they need to spend that ISK on things being sold by newer players, your “solution” makes it basically impossible for an actual new player to start off, you’ve not actually considered all the knock on effects, there is a reason most players aren’t consulted when it comes to massive changes like that

It would easily work that way. It’s worked that way in the past and there’s literally nothing stopping it from working that way now. Sure it might be a couple more steps for the solo PvEer BUT WHO CARES ABOUT THE SOLO PVEer IN A PVP MMO. If it balances the rest of the game SOLO PVEer BE DAMNED. They do nothing but offer no content to other players, inflate the currency, and raise the price of plex. They’re literally just a leech to the rest of us. I get that they make CCP money, but catering to them is degrading the entirety of the game.

@Cypherous

And they get that, just not in high sec, if you want player driven content go to low sec or null and fight there

They don’t get it anywhere man. Do you read these forums? This game has been castrated by CCP. Low sec is dead, Null sec is a big blue donut. Any place but High Sec will in most cases take you hours to find content and when you find it it will be a bot in a vexor navy or a stabbed plexer who warps out the second you enter local (because as much as CCP claims to fight the botting problem they’re really just blowing smoke).

[Salt_Foambreaker]

As a software developer for over 30 years I can tell you that what the players want is lip service at best.

Each developer has their OWN IDEAS of what they think would be cool. In the EGO fight among developers to see whose idea wins, the players have no place.

That is why so many things get changed that no one asked for.

If you get devs who have bad ideas the product is screwed. Take a look at a game called The Secret World, it was a good MMORPG that had a strong following, but then they hired some devs who thought FPS was cool and so they converted an MMO into an FPS. A total failure, but those devs just update their resume and move on, leaving carnage in their wake.

Sure there are always voices who stand against that sort of nonsense, but sadly within the profession we have what are called DESIGN BULLIES. If you speak against their idea you get personal attacks, politics and back stabbing until you update your resume and leave (CCP Falcon??). In the end the company is left with only people who agree with the design bully.

So ya, what we want means nothing.

[Han_Zealot]

@Salt_Foambreaker

So ya, what we want means nothing.

I wouldn’t say “nothing” but it matters very little. Although I do think that CCP team does its damned best to try and keep players happy to the limit of their power.

Few days ago I received a nice email reply concerning a ticket I had submitted. It started with apologies for the delay in response time ( y’all think a week is long for a ticket to get taken care of? I surely don’t ) then he wrote that what I had asked for wasn’t going to be possible. He apologized and compensated me instead. I was very satisfied.
So saying that they don’t care and what we want means nothing is a bit harsh.

[Nana_Skalski]

@Salt_Foambreaker

Each developer has their OWN IDEAS of what they think would be cool. In the EGO fight among developers to see whose idea wins, the players have no place.

Devs are for players, as game they create is for players, not for themselves, and good CEO will remind them about it. Good CEO, I dont think Hilmar qualifies.

[Cypherous]

@hellokittyonline

That makes no sense and now you’re just making ■■■■ up to see yourself type.

Oh?

You mean the change back in 2012’ish which removed all meta 0 loot from drops replacing them with a single unit of metal scraps because reprocessing NPC loot was far too efficient in terms of the minerals generated from what amounted to free drops?

New Dev Blog: Carebearing 2.0 - EVE Information Portal - EVE Online Forums

@hellokittyonline

An old one that you probably weren’t here for.

I’ve been around since 2004, i was here for it, so be specific

[hellokittyonline]

Something along these lines would definitely be an improvement but given how absent CCP is on their own forums I fear they do not value player opinions at all. I said it before and I’ll say it again: CCP is stringing us along and the only thing they’re actually focused on is not being upside down in debt when one of their ■■■■ patches finally kills the game for good.

[hellokittyonline]

Cite sources? Are you kidding me? You link an unrelated patch in response to a comment made in passing while ignoring the main purpose of my post. You didn’t even respond to the parts about the bounties themselves which is actually the focus of my post. Now you expect me to dig through patch notes because you actually have no clue what you’re talking about? NTY

However, since you can’t seem to let it go it was sometime during incursion when they started adding the noctis and later MTUs. It tanked the value of salvage to the point that PvEers actually stopped caring about it. It became more profitable to blitz the mission than to salvage (which meant that there was WAY more isk being created from missions than before). They also added Incursions which did IRREPAIRABLE damage to the economy. The reason? Too much ISK is being created with bounties. PLEX was 250mil a month before Incursions and the salvage change. Incursions weren’t even supposed to be permanent. Now we’re at 1.8bil a month and you wonder why we can’t retain new players.

No new bro could ever dream of plexing with isk at this point. Furthermore, no new bro is going to pay 15 dollars a month to watch skills train so they can pay 15 dollars a month to grind shitty PvE just to afford to do PvP. THEN they can’t even FIND PvP because all of the High Sec entities (the people who actually train most of your PvPers believe it or not) are basically dead or have no need for recruits (because they cannot bring backup anymore) and Low-Sec and Null-Sec are a content wasteland. Nobody joins Eve because of the riveting PvE stories they hear. They join because of the PVP STORIES. Continuing to coddle PvEers is doing nothing but hurting the health of EvE.

[Xanthellus]

@hellokittyonline

No new bro could ever dream of plexing with isk at this point

I could if I wanted to and I’m 2 months in. I just choose not to because it’s an insignificant amount of money (for me). Although I did “cheat” by buying plex for injectors. Still, even before that and with the knowledge I built up I could do it just fine, if only I made less costly choices.

[Destiny_Corrupted]

The answer is “players want to mine and run missions in peace without any interference from griefers.”

End debate.

The real question isn’t what players want, but whether they should be given what they want.